by Robert Brown
Heinrich spent two hours with him the first day and six hours the second day. When the old guy flagged, they moved to a Polish bar across the street where they drank potato vodka and ate sausage while the lesson continued. Pavel called over some of his friends who looked like they never left the place and Heinrich became the center of attention while the Poles fired vocabulary words at him and he parroted them back to them. He bought a couple of rounds for the whole bar. That vile woman up in Westchester County could pay for it.
When he visited Mrs. Briggs two days later, he brought a letter he had Pavel write outlining his progress. It had so many exclamation points Heinrich almost felt embarrassed. To drive his point home, Heinrich also repeated back all the Romanian she had taught him.
“Your talents are remarkable,” the widow said, clearly impressed. “You’re not living up to your potential.”
“That’s what the teachers at juvvie used to say.”
“You were a criminal?”
“Just a kid having fun.”
“I’m surprised your grandfather didn’t cultivate sufficient values in you.”
Heinrich ground his teeth. He’d been expecting this, but it still hit him harder than that hipster he’d floored. “How the hell did you know about that?”
“It was in all the papers. We remember these things. When I was looking for a private investigator, your surname rang a bell. I did a bit of research and discovered the connection.”
“And you think I’ll help you just because my last name is Müller?”
“Yes.”
“Lady, after the shit hit the fan with my granddad I wanted to change my name from Heinrich Müller to Henry Miller, only that was already taken.”
“Be proud of your name, young man.”
“It’s not the name I have a problem with. It’s what’s attached to it.”
“Are you a communist, Mr. Müller?”
“Hell, no.”
“Many Germans in your grandfather’s generation enlisted not to support the Nazis but to fight communism. History forgets that.”
“History hasn’t forgotten the other shit they did, and neither have I.”
The widow leaned forward, her eyes fixed on him. “And you can help reverse some of that and stop it from happening again. The Purity League will figure out how to decode that message sooner rather later, and when they do, they’ll get the treasure. The far right in Europe will rise like a wolf from the ashes.”
“It’s a phoenix.” Heinrich looked around at all the Nazi memorabilia. “And why do you care?”
“Because I have read history and learned from it. Those movements only lead to destruction. Look at Germany after the war. Millions dead, women and girls raped by Soviet savages, cities laid waste, a country divided for fifty years. That will happen again with people like the Purity League in charge. If they’re willing to kill a kind old man for a simple document, think what else they will do. We have to stop them.”
“I thought you were hiring me to solve your husband’s murder.”
“I already know who murdered him. Not the individual member, but I know it was the Purity League. Punishing them will be good enough, and if we get the treasure, we can help the victims of the Third Reich.”
“The gypsies and homos. Yeah, you mentioned that. I’m surprised you care.”
“The Nazis went too far. It’s one thing to reestablish sound morals. It’s another to wipe out people for being who they are.”
Heinrich almost brought up the Jews again but decided against it. He didn’t want another argument. Didn’t want one because she had convinced him. Smacking down the Purity League and getting paid to do it was the most appealing offer he’d gotten in a long, long time.
Not that he trusted her.
“I need all this in writing.”
He hadn’t finished his sentence before she laid a contract in front of him.
He read it. It said everything she had promised—the money, his cut, and the promise that the rest of it would go to charities benefitting gypsies and homosexuals in Europe. There were even architectural plans for several monuments to those killed in the Holocaust.
She handed him a pen.
“I don’t get it,” he said. “You’re convinced there’s millions of bucks hidden in the Polish woods somewhere and you want to give it all away. Don’t tell me you’ve got lots of gypsy and gay friends because I don’t believe it.”
“My reasons for doing this are my private affair, Mr. Müller, just as yours would be if they weren’t so obvious.”
“You don’t know me, lady.”
But she did. Oh, but she did.
CHAPTER FOUR
So there it was. The old bag had put her cards on the table. She had gotten one thing wrong though. Grandpa Otto hadn’t turned him into a juvenile delinquent; he had saved him from being one and then turned him into a screwed up adult.
Mom and Dad had been the ones who turned him into a little thug. Mom with her oceans of gin and bedridden wailings about how no one appreciated her, Dad with his oceans of whiskey and barely hidden philandering. Heinrich did what most kids in that situation would have done—started smoking weed and shoplifting. When he was fourteen, he graduated to snorting coke and stealing cars and got arrested after wrapping a Trans Am around a telephone pole. He still had a scar on his hand where it had gone through the windshield.
He’d spent a year and a half in juvvie. His parents refused to pull him out and ended up getting divorced and disappearing from his life. They never visited and only called twice.
And then came a savior. Grandpa Otto offered to take him in. He barely knew Grandpa Otto, his father’s father. Dad never talked to him or about him and Heinrich had only met him once when he was seven when Grandpa Otto showed up at their house unannounced. All he remembered was a portly old man with a full white beard arguing with Dad in German. Heinrich never understood why Dad was shouting at Santa Claus.
Grandpa Otto sure seemed like Santa Claus when he signed the papers that sprung him from juvvie. His parents had signed too, glad to be rid of him. The feeling was mutual.
His grandfather had his hands full taking on an obnoxious kid who liked to get wasted and steal stuff, but that behavior vanished almost immediately. Otto was a jovial old man from the old country, with a thick accent and a quick wit. It was Grandpa Otto who discovered Heinrich’s knack for languages by insisting he learn German. Heinrich had never paid attention in school so he’d never noticed his talent, but part of the deal to live with him was that he “learn the language of his Volk.”
In less than a month he was carrying on complex conversations with his grandfather. Heinrich’s self-esteem soared and the young punk and the old man got along great.
There followed the five happiest years of Heinrich’s life, during which he lived with Otto in his Manhattan apartment, graduated high school, and matriculated into City University to major in linguistics. There were birthday parties and trips to the zoo and season tickets to the Mets. There was kindness, generosity, and gentle discipline. There was everything his own parents had skipped. Heinrich couldn’t understand why his father hated this kindly old man who had done everything for him and asked for nothing in return except the good behavior that Heinrich was now eager to give.
Then lightning struck.
“NAZI WAR CRIMINAL DISCOVERED LIVING IN NEW YORK”
A banner headline in the Daily News and a photo of his grandfather entering their building, taken from across the street. Half the image was obscured by the parked car the photographer had hidden behind. Next to that was an old portrait photo of a young man in an SS uniform. Heinrich tried very hard to convince himself the two photos weren’t of the same man. Tried and failed.
Now Heinrich understood why Grandpa Otto talked about the old country all the time but never took him there. He understood why he was so vague about his past and he understood his dad kicking the guy out of their life.
Otto Müller was not his real n
ame, which meant Müller wasn’t Heinrich’s real name either. In the dying days of the Third Reich he had used his connections to get a fake passport saying he was Czech and fled first to Argentina, then to the United States. He had settled down in New York City and the law never caught up with him until an Israeli organization that hunted war criminals tracked him down. They’d nabbed him because they had been investigating a new Pan-European neo-Nazi organization called the Purity League. Grandpa Otto had been a major donor.
It had all come out in the trial, that humiliating, terrible trial that made headlines for months. Heinrich moved out. His Jewish girlfriend dumped him. His black friends wouldn’t talk to him. People whispered when he entered a classroom. He dropped out of college.
Otto Müller did not survive the trial. He did not survive the stress of the documentary evidence and the witness testimonies. The photos of the packed cattle cars and mass graves overwhelmed his already aged heart. He died before the judge could pass sentence. The court found him guilty, anyway.
Heinrich hadn’t talked to him since the trial began. Otto’s lawyer informed him of his will, which left everything to him. It amounted to an apartment and a bit of money. Heinrich had no job and no prospects so he swallowed his pride and accepted his inheritance. The first day back in the familiar apartment he had spent twelve hours cleaning out every trace of his grandfather—every piece of furniture, every picture, every memento. He even threw out the coasters and silverware, anything Otto had owned. While rummaging through old boxes and stacks of photos he kept thinking he’d come across some Nazi literature or a medal or a photo of his SS unit, but he found nothing. Otto Müller had left all that behind him. Heinrich did the same.
That had been 25 years ago, and he had thought he had managed it, but just like his grandfather, he found the past had a way of coming back at you.
✽ ✽ ✽
Heinrich tried to control his trembling as he came to the apartment on 45th St. It was on the second floor of a well-preserved old brownstone, the kind of place that went for cheap when he was a kid and now sold for a cool million. A gruff voice on the intercom demanded his name. He gave the alias his Eritrean friend had been using and got buzzed in.
A narrow flight of stairs took him up to the landing where an impressively muscled man with a shaved head and an angry scowl stood next to the door. He looked about the same size as the attacker. Different clothes, though, and the attacker hadn’t had a shaved head. Of course the attacker could have shaved his head, but then it wouldn’t have had time to develop the uniform coloring this guy sported.
“Password?” Baldy whispered, his voice at odds with his menacing stance. These guys weren’t exactly being subtle. Heinrich wondered what the neighbors thought.
“John Birch didn’t go far enough,” Heinrich replied.
“Sure as hell didn’t,” the man said, and opened the door.
The interior smelled of money. The front hall had a marble floor and oil paintings on the walls. The paintings were simple landscapes, no giveaways that neo-Nazis lived here.
That all changed when he walked down the short hall and entered the spacious living room.
The furniture had been cleared out to allow room for several rows of chairs facing one side of the room. The wall on that side was decorated with a large swastika flag that looked original. Along the other walls hung several framed German and Italian fascist posters, also original. Judging from the prices he had seen on the Briggs’s online catalog, the owner of this place had spent tens of thousands just on the part of the collection decorating on the walls. He wondered what other stuff was tucked away.
He noticed that none of the posters would be visible from the street. The blinds were drawn anyway, no doubt because the flag would have been. Heinrich figured it had been hung especially for the occasion.
About twenty people sat in the chairs or milled around chatting. Nobody seemed to know anybody else. Biniam had explained this to him. It was called an IRL Meetup, as in “in real life” meetup, where the denizens of the dingier corners of the web finally came out from behind their online anonymity and met face to face.
He scanned the room, looking for someone who matched the general description of Aaron’s killer, and found several. The problem was that the description was too damn general. Finding the actual guy would take a lot of investigation and a fair bit of luck. Heinrich saw a lot of young blood here, plus some older guys and one tottering ancient who may have fought on the wrong side of World War Two. Everyone was white and with only a couple of exceptions everyone was male.
He did, however, catch a lot of accents. His ear for accents was as good as his ear for languages, and he heard natives of Italy, England, Spain, and France in the crowd. No Polish, unfortunately.
Heinrich found a seat near the back where he could observe without being seen too clearly by the speakers. A middle-aged man sat down next to him and extended a hand.
“Heil Hitler. Pleased to meet you,” the man said.
“Pleased to meet you too.” Heinrich couldn’t bring himself to return the complete greeting. It took all his self control to let the man keep his teeth.
The guy didn’t seem to notice. “Glad to be finally having a meeting like this. Things are starting to move.”
“Damn right they are. About time too.”
“You been keeping your computer clean?”
“What do you mean?” Heinrich asked. “I take all the usual precautions.”
“Haven’t you downloaded the latest issue of the Crooked Cross?”
“I’ve been really busy with work, and I’ve been rereading Mein Kampf.”
The guy’s face lit up. “Ah, a fine book.” Then he got serious again. “Oh, but it’s a good thing you haven’t downloaded the latest issue. It’s got a virus. I and a few other brothers had our hard drives wiped.”
Heinrich suppressed a smile. That sounded like Biniam’s work. He was glad to see his friend had a productive hobby. Before Heinrich could figure out something else to say, someone clearing their throat in the front of the room brought the crowd to silence. A middle-aged man who dressed like he had just stepped out of the bar of a country club addressed the crowd.
“Welcome to my home. Sieg Heil!”
He made the straight-armed salute, standing proudly in front of the Nazi flag in his button-down shirt, yellow slacks, and a blue sweater tied around his neck.
I knew it, Heinrich thought. The preppies are all Nazis.
“Sieg Heil!” the crowd replied. Heinrich managed the salute but only mouthed the words. His heart raced.
“Now you’ll forgive me if I don’t introduce myself,” this brought some nervous laughter from the crowd, “but with his prior permission I will introduce our speaker for tonight. He is brave enough to go by his real name. Marcus Bowers. He’s the new East Coast representative for the Purity League and he’s here to tell us all about the plans he and his organization have for this sector. So with no further ado, I give you Mr. Bowers.”
Everyone applauded. The man who stood up was well past fifty and going bald and fat. He looked a far cry from the Aryan supermen in the room’s posters and was certainly not the man who had bashed Aaron’s brains out.
“Hail, Aryan brothers and sisters, and welcome to what I hope will be the first and smallest of many meetings. Judging from your comments on VrilBoard, you are all familiar with what the Purity League has accomplished in the past. Let me fill you in on what we plan to accomplish in the near future.”
Bowers went on to talk in a general way about how the Purity League was finally crossing the ocean and setting up cells in various sectors of the U.S. and Canada. He outlined how the League would act as a donor and unifier for the various small, factional groups. This had always been a problem with the movement, he said, too many egos and too many divisions and splinter groups. All that would change, not through any top down enforcement, but through a meeting of the minds via the Purity League.
He made it all
sound so rational and simple, how greater unity among the far right would finally wake up the white man to the dangers of international Jewry, Communism, and race mixing. Heinrich writhed as a trickle of sweat ran down his back. He felt the urge to scratch it but he didn’t dare bring attention to himself. The man beside him glanced at him a couple of times before Heinrich noticed his hands were trembling. He clenched them and shoved them in his pockets.
Bowers made a big deal of how well funded the Purity League was, bankrolling the legal defense for a Klan member on trial for killing a black man, building a new meeting room for an Aryan group in Oregon, and providing web hosting to a dozen different groups. For a moment Heinrich wondered if they had gotten the treasure train already, then decided they would have done something far more grandiose with the money. No, the Purity League was already well funded, thanks to people like his grandfather, but the group seemed to have the confidence they’d hit the big leagues soon.
Heinrich discovered he was grinding his teeth. He forced himself to stop and focused on the problem at hand.
Did Bowers know about the murder and did he know about the treasure train? He decided the answer was no on both counts. From what Heinrich had read and seen, the Purity League worked on a cell structure like many radical organizations. For reasons of security, one cell did not know what the other was doing or even who comprised its membership. Bowers would not be standing here giving a speech just twelve blocks from where his organization had murdered someone a few weeks before if he had known anything about it. Bowers had not been told, and the Purity League felt safe enough in their anonymity to raise their heads at a supposedly secure meeting.
Just as Heinrich decided this was a waste of his time, he got the one good kernel of information for the evening.
“And to conclude,” Bowers said, “I would like to call for a moment of silence for a fallen soldier. Dieter Freytag was a proud German living in Greater Germany, the part illegally occupied by Poland. As you know, the Communist element is strong there, and May Day is coming up. Freytag was organizing a counterdemonstration to the May Day parade and was found the day before yesterday stabbed to death outside his home. His struggle is our struggle, and his sacrifice is an example to us all. Dieter Freytag, we salute you.”